I was thinking through some alternate rules for bionic limb replacement which would handle their stats independent of the characters stats. This would include independent BIV, strength, along with different effects for injury levels.
I started thinking about applying some of these principals to power armor, but one thing led to another and the image of a character sheet for power armor popped into my head. It's still pretty raw, but I wanted to rough out some ideas and make sure no one else had already gone down this rabbit hole (in which case I'd definitely also be interested in seeing what had already been written).
Fluff-wise, power armor deserves a little more attention than it currently gets. High armor value, a strength bonus, and maybe some auto-senses are nice, but this is a unique piece of Imperial history that's being fielded, with its own quirks and back story. Wouldn't it be more interesting to have an entire sheet devoted to it, with more options overall but also more detail when it takes damage?
My thinking is that it would make it a whole lot more fun to take power armor and would also make a player feel less cheated when their warband has one or two fewer models on the board since they essentially have an entire extra character on the outside of their leader. It would also make SMs a lot more interested, but that's a longer story.
Anyway, I'll be toying around with some drafts in the coming weeks but I wanted to put this out there to get the conversation going. My initial thought is give a certain number of injury levels for each location with injury effects ranging from the AV of the location dropping to losing strength bonuses or even having the component freeze up on you. For stronger armor the attacker may need to do a level or two of damage to the armor before the character is affected at all.
In the long run I think this could make power armor a lot more interesting for both players. The whole 10 points or armor thing can make ridiculous when you have a modestly armed group who is praying for two sixes to even put a scratch in the opposition. With this system though you could see progress being made and eventually start doing some real damage.
Anyway, just some initial thoughts. What does the community think?
Quote from: Alyster Wick on September 21, 2015, 03:44:44 AM
I was thinking through some alternate rules for bionic limb replacement which would handle their stats independent of the characters stats. This would include independent BIV, strength, along with different effects for injury levels.
I've started to do something similar.
For an example, the latest version of Silva's character sheet gives her bionics BIV 5 & AV 8, in place of her normal T 73 - designed to represent them being heavily armoured (and customised) military models, but nonetheless containing sensitive components.
As far as completely different injury effects, I've stopped short of going that far. I am considering the option that bionics might perhaps have immunity to bleeding, system shock or maybe a cap on injury total (dependent on various things, like whether the nerve interface has a cut-out. Particularly crude bionics might perhaps have badly calibrated damage feedback and have the inverse effect!), but the injury rules are already one of the time-sinks of the game - somewhat necessarily, as I think the detailed damage system is what makes a PvP RPG like Inquisitor viable, but the game tends to slow down a lot once you've got to start looking up injury effects.
(I've found it to be less of a burden since I reformatted the injury table for my updated quick reference, abbreviating everything down to get rid of all the "As Heavy" guff and laying it out more intuitively, but fixing it isn't really an argument to mess it up again)
QuoteFluff-wise, power armor deserves a little more attention than it currently gets. High armor value, a strength bonus, and maybe some auto-senses are nice, but this is a unique piece of Imperial history that's being fielded, with its own quirks and back story. Wouldn't it be more interesting to have an entire sheet devoted to it, with more options overall but also more detail when it takes damage?
I think it could be very interesting and potentially a very characterful solution to the toughness of power armour.
I get the idea that it could feel almost more like fighting the character's armour. If their suit starts to shut down, then it's two hundred kilos of dead weight - even if they're completely unharmed, they're not going to be doing much with to compete with. A sense that power armour isn't just something you wear but something you pilot - I think that would be a rather nice take on the whole thing.
The trick though would be in not making it into too much of a rules burden, and I'm not necessarily sure the "pilot, not wear" thing would be right for
every suit, but there's certainly something to work with there.
Quotean entire extra character on the outside of their leader.
It's not
necessarily the leader of course. The most likely such examples suitable for regular use would probably be Battle Sisters, who may well be under someone else's command.
Certainly, when Sister Phoenix finally has an Ecclesiarchy warband to join, she'll be technically serving as a bodyguard for... well, most of the rest of the characters involved.
QuoteIn the long run I think this could make power armor a lot more interesting for both players. The whole 10 points or armor thing can make ridiculous when you have a modestly armed group who is praying for two sixes to even put a scratch in the opposition. With this system though you could see progress being made and eventually start doing some real damage.
Well, I was discussing a similar point via PM on Ammobunker recently, about the possibility of an INQ2.0 system trying to make things like power armour and weapons less cheesy - still powerful, but not something that a player had to feel guilty about bringing to the table occasionally.
I think power armour's balance has changed a certain amount with my Revised Armoury, which is used prevalently enough that its slight increase to things like rifle and shotgun damage (such as 3D6 rather than 2D6+2) makes a difference to exactly how much AV10 can shrug off, but the idea of addressing such things on a more fundamental game mechanics level did come up. Still thinking on that one though.
I think it's the usual trap: if something seems important, give it more rules!
But more rules make the game more clumsy...
If anyone cares, try GURPS - it's an old school, "rules-heavy" RPG system (it has rules for anything that can come up during a game session) streamlined for fast learning and easy playing in its 4th edition. In that, a power armour is just a handful of modifiers, although you can write a full page of its actual contents and attributes
The idea of PA as a separate character makes me want to make a Sibberingarine in INQ, complete with the octomode bolts and the tripartite minds (one mind for the Astartes, in charge, supplemented by the armour's mind and the bolter's mind into the COVENet, or just Coven). That might be taking things too far, but I can see it potentially work as an occasional element in a Deathwatch game.
Quote from: KaptiDavy on September 21, 2015, 07:09:54 PMI think it's the usual trap: if something seems important, give it more rules!
But more rules make the game more clumsy...
Well, yes and no. Cluttering up the rules is something to be wary of, but I'd say "interesting" and "important" are exactly the kind of thing that deserve their own rules.
I may be on an extreme end of the scale here, as it's far from unusual for my characters to have half a dozen custom special rules, and very often more (at the extreme end, Maya Avens has 33 abilities), but I find the quantity of rules is less of a clunky issue than the quality of those rules.
When I read the OP, specifically making the suits themselves more individual and giving them a bit of personality, my mind went immediately to the Necromundan Spyrer suits.
I might have built it up a bit in memory, but I'm sure I saw a Nec article (WD/CJ/something) about Spyrer gang experience - the suits doing the levelling up instead of the wearers. The longer they're on the hunt in the Underhive, the more systems come online, building up to full Predator-mode or Robocop mode etc.
In that, there might even have been a nice big random-roll table of suit gadgets, routines and enhancements that sound like the sort of thing always imagined a Space Marine suit would have, or that the suits machine spirit could activate.
I was thinking that the importance of rules for PA depends on whether or not the character ever takes it off. If they do, you could have the physical stats, even WS and BS, be the suits, along with a bunch of skills, and some of the character's skills get cancelled out, so these two entities overlap in various ways... Similar to that Spyrer idea.
DapperAnarchist's idea comes a bit closer, I think - but it could still mean a bunch of modifiers after all
The whole thing boils down to campaign/scenario considerations... I always wanted to ask how much of your usual game time is spent on action and other, more RPG like activities (if conversations, interrogations and puzzles are part of a scenario or played between tabletop actions)?
Quote from: DapperAnarchist on September 22, 2015, 08:02:01 PMI was thinking that the importance of rules for PA depends on whether or not the character ever takes it off.
I think that's probably one of the better ways to use power armour. Like any powerful equipment, being able to swap it in or out as appropriate to the scenario does quite a lot to address its balance.
I may do something like this with Silva Birgen, modelling several options between her standard gear and some of the heavy weapons she sometimes uses in background stories - they're not everyday gear (and in a lot of cases, she might well just grab a bolter) but she's known to use heavy machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, anti-materiel rifles and even gatling guns and light autocannons on occasion.
I think though, there'd be something potentially interesting about differentiating power armour more than just swapping which character sheet the character is using (the default damage rules don't necessarily represent that very well). I think rules clutter is something to bear in mind at all times with this, but I think it's worth looking into; it's possible to produce detailed rules without them being clunky.
Quote from: KaptiDavy on September 22, 2015, 09:28:54 PM
DapperAnarchist's idea comes a bit closer, I think - but it could still mean a bunch of modifiers after all
The whole thing boils down to campaign/scenario considerations... I always wanted to ask how much of your usual game time is spent on action and other, more RPG like activities (if conversations, interrogations and puzzles are part of a scenario or played between tabletop actions)?
I've tried pushing some games with more RP elements with my group (of very occasional) players but I'm leaning back towards more action focused scenarios as folks get more comfortable with the universe. I've found that when you let new players get sucked in by the action and push gently with your own warband/NPCs then the RPing elements will come out natually rather than trying to force it.
Moving on from that bit, I've gotta say, more rules for power armor don't seem like a burden at all to me. If the rules for the armor are no more complicated than the rules for an additional character then there's no reason to think of it any differently. I wouldn't shy away from this concept any more than I'd shy away from the idea that a game could be player with a 5 person warband rather than a 4 person warband.
Taking into account that many of the statistics that pair with the armor are likely to be on the character's own sheet (weapons, stats, etc) it leaves plenty of room to have additional rules (alternate damage effects, etc) on the PA's sheet so you don't have to look them up.
To go off on a bit of a tangent, not all extra rules are equal. If you have a character that has a dozen special abilities from the original rulebook along with special ammo, then you're going to forget something and/or it'll make the game slow. If you give a character 30 some-odd special rules that you custom design but that are all interrelated somehow (IE they all deal with variations on how to use a custom psychic ability in different situations) then it's less about a stack of complex rules than it is about a style of play suited to a character's unique abilities (I'm going out on a limb here Marco and assuming that's the situation with the character you described above with a ton of abilities). In that scenario you're less apt to forget the rules because that's tantamount to forgetting what character you're playing. Much the same way, giving power armor its own sheet feels right. You aren't going to suddenly forget the character is wearing power armor and send them sprinting across the board when the rules state they can't (because it's a primitive model of armor and you can never more faster than a run). When someone shoots you with a plasma gun you aren't going to apply it to your character's sheet and forget you have an entire other sheet where the damage is supposed to go. I really think this is an example where something fits organically and extra rules add richness rather than confusion. It would actually encourage players using power armor to field less models as when they select their PA character they already have two sheets to be working with. The kinds of players who build two separate models for a character (one with PA and one without) will really be able to feel the difference now that their shiny custom PA mini comes with an entire character sheet of its own. I can tell you that just writing this paragraph has made me contemplate which characters I'm going to decapitate when I get home so I can magnetize their head onto a power armored torso.
I understand I'm throwing out a lot of hypotheticals at this point, but hopefully when I can show what I'm talking about it will all seem a bit more sane.
Quote from: Alyster Wick on September 23, 2015, 02:58:49 AMIIf you give a character 30 some-odd special rules that you custom design but that are all interrelated somehow (IE they all deal with variations on how to use a custom psychic ability in different situations) then it's less about a stack of complex rules than it is about a style of play suited to a character's unique abilities (I'm going out on a limb here Marco and assuming that's the situation with the character you described above with a ton of abilities).
Pretty much. Maya has very focused psychic disciplines through which she can channel her powers*, but she's incredibly creative and skilled in how she uses and combines those seemingly narrow options.
* Her pyrokinesis is fairly unrestrained, but her telepathy is largely limited to empathy (she can read and manipulate emotion, but not conscious thought or memory) and her telekinesis doesn't work on anything bigger/heavier than photons or air molecules.The other thing is that I didn't want her to always fall back on just throwing fireballs everywhere if it came to a fight, so I've tried to make sure that I've given her a lot of options while staying within the defined limits of her power.
Hence she has abilities that relate to instilling fear, hope, doubt, rage, disgust and more, all with their own interesting effects in game, plus a few seeming oddities that do find use from time to time - she can summon up some moderately powerful sonic effects through manipulating air vibrations and the like.
That many abilities is an unusual case even for me, but it all fits quite a tight theme, so she tends to work reasonably fluidly in game.
I'm really impressed when someone makes multiple versions of their character, and would be tempted to do it myself, but it takes time, money, and a commitment to replicating enough details to make it reasonably clear that they are in fact the same character. The only one I got anywhere with was a plan to make bound and unbound versions of a Daemonhost, united mostly by sharing the octopus head from the Spawn kit. This gets harder when you want to make an inscale 54mm Marine - not easy! Though if you really do want to, the Spawn torso piece is pretty close to the right size. But generally, because PA will be unique to a character and not shared around much due to narrative and practical concerns, for the most part my rule idea seems mostly an explanation of what the rules will always be, and not that different from the existing "+X% Strength, Autosenses" type rules we have. Sorry to be a downer on my own rules, I'm always glad people like stuff I write.
To my mind, power armour is rather like daemon weapons, in that it is a unique form of equipment with its own personality. By the LRB, all power armour is identical, and fairly simplistic. Going by the background however, there are eight patterns of astartes power armour, with countless other chapter specific patterns and designs for regular humans, not counting the unique custom models which must be fairly common (by the standards of power armour) in the Inquisition.
Power armour isn't just regular armour, and it seems far too bland if you treat it like it is. Even if it does add an extra layer of complexity, I think that giving power armour its own character sheet is a much better representation of how its should function, and someone fielding power armour likely doesn't have a large number of other characters with complex rules on the table, so I support it.
Thought I might add my comment to this one. I love the idea of unique power armour getting its own character sheet, and special rules. whether it is just slightly different armour or strength bonuses between the different types or armour or resistance to knock down or whatever. (Watching Iron Man 3 could lead to a whole host of different unique power armours)
Another thought is that a lot of the fiction does comment around power armour having a machine spirit that needs to be appeased. Maybe this could be represented by giving the armour an intellegence value and then testing against it in certain circumstances where if successful the armour gives additional bonuses (such as instead of 20% strength gain can get 50% for a single action to force open a door or dig yourself our from a landslide; bonuses for the test from doing additional things to appease the machine spirit).
Just some thoughts to throw into the mix (I now really want to do a power armoured character or three).
Marc/Blacknight
The machine spirit seems intriguing - WP and Ld would justify that sheet more than any of the previously mentioned things
I have a fair amount of notes pulled together, but as they're pretty scatter brained I'm going to put a summary here:
- Machine Spirit: Yes and yes. This is absolutely going to be an element of the Power Armor. Notably, I'm toying around with different basic "armor archetypes", if you will, some of which have machine spirits and others of which don't. Basically there will be some tests involved in using power armor as it's very different from walking around like a normal person. If a suit of Power Armor has a machine spirit they will be testing off of the Machine Spirit rather than their SG, or they may be able to reroll their SG test, or they may be able to bypass the test altogether depending on the situation/type of machine spirit. I'm still working out how this will all work. There shouldn't be a burdensome amount of tests, but PA is a huge boon and should come with some characterful downsides/challenges. Additionally, I'd love to add some rules for a malign machine spirit (inferring a daemonic or evil AI presence in the suit).
- Power Armor Archetypes: As mentioned above, there will be a number of archetypes that I'd like to present. These will range from Industrial (not so much power armor as the power lifter from alien), to crude (think of a wasteland overlord who may have just strapped some armor plates and machine guns to an industrial lifter), to lighter power armor (closer to powered carapace), to full battle armor (SM armor for regular humans). Each archetype will allow different options, ranging from more armor, limiting movement (you can't run in a power lifter), number of damage levels per location, etc.
- Damage Levels - Speaking of which, my plan is to come up with a variety of injury effects and make it a kind of choose your own adventure to create the power armor. Rather than saying, "all power armor will have 5 levels of damage and they are blank," I'd like to present possibly 10 unique effects per location and let the player choose which ones make sense (and in which order) based on their personal armor. This will require GM oversight as a nefarious player could just pick ten levels of ablative armor where they lose a level but suffer not ill effects (on that note, heftier suits of PA will have one or more ablative levels of damage where you tick off an injury level but suffer no ill effects). Then again, GM oversight is always required as players currently are free to take whatever they'd like. As a parting shot, each injury level will have a corresponding armor value attached to it. Thus someone wearing a pristine suit of armor may have 12 armor on each location, but that may drop to 10 after a level of damage has been done, 8 after two levels have been done, etc. Not that the value needs to drop by two each time damage is done, but just as an example. The point is, the character can still take damage even if a location isn't destroyed yet.
- Unique Stats - Each suit of PA will have it's own stat line. This won't line up exactly with what a character has, but will include strength (maybe with a bonus added based on the character's strength, but in most cases I think the suit will do all the work), toughness or structure maybe (a stand in for T that establishes BIV), base armor level (even armor has armor), a knockback characteristic (a character's strength is largely irrelevant, the weight and strength of the suit will dictate when they're knocked back). There may be some other stats, but these are the big ones.
- Special Abilities List - Armor will grant unique abilities to the wearer to further customize the armor. These could include full auto-senses, rock steady aim, the ability to wield a basic weapon one handed, implant weaponry, bonuses to movement/jumping, jump packs, etc. Any and all suggestions welcome here.
- Power Source - These things run on something, am I right? Power sources will be located in specific locations on the PA and will offer a tempting target for those trying to disable the power armored individual. SM's obviously have the backpack (a large but sturdy target) while more primitive suits may have a hidden powersource that required power cables that run throughout the suit (offering a chance to completely disable an extremity on a critical hit). There will be a few different options for what would power your suit and options for where this power source could be placed, offering a large array of options to customize your suit. Much like my idea of a daemonic machine spirit, it'd be fun to have a daemonic power source (obviously involving some substantial downsides, IE possession).
Anyway, those are my scattered thoughts. I would love any and all suggestions if any of these ideas spark your interest or ideas of your own. Honestly I think there's enough here to assemble an entire sourcebook rather than just an article (but one small step at a time).
Could damage levels instead be wrapped up in a more general house rule for armour damage that allows for armour, even non-ablative, to be destroyed (or, rather, made non-effective)? Seems odd that 3 inches of ceramite and plasteel can, after a flurry of las bolts or shotgun blasts, withstand less impact than a thin steel/leather breastplate after the same impacts (assuming what's inside that armour can survive - say, a possessed entity, or Marco's funcitonally immortal mutant character). You might also want to put strong lower limits on that, to avoid the death of a thousand cuts.
I'm very intrigued by the machine spirit ideas - but perhaps it should be the exception, rather than the rule? Perhaps have it as a form of injury level, so that damage to the suit/disruption of the relationship between suit and wearer would cause, for X turns/until a test is passed, a need to use SG/MS rolls to perform most actions. Reduces the rolls, but keeps it around as a thing that could happen.
Archetypes seem like a obvious one actually, and it's weird that the closest we've had is occasional "PA, but with Carapace level armour" so far.
Would the Stat Line be a bit like the Marine Implant rules, basically applying a different but similar rule set and stat line to the character? That seems fair. I guess my suspicions earlier were based on a worry that PA could be treated very separate from the character, when in practice it isn't, usually.
Why are you guys trying to clutter up the game with so much crunch for a single piece of wargear? It's equipment. I agree it needs to be treated differently to how it is at the moment, but surely it's so much simpler to just take inspiration from the power armour rules and especially the history tables in Deathwatch and Rites of Battle, where that level of extra detail is relevant and pertinent. Inquisitor gets bogged down as it is by unnecessary complexity and adding more is a massive turn-off.
Change the way power armour works by all means but it needs to be kept simple, accessible and something players will want to use.
Quote from: Koval on October 07, 2015, 07:21:28 AMWhy are you guys trying to clutter up the game with so much crunch for a single piece of wargear?
Because I agree with Alyster that power armour, single piece of wargear or not, deserves to be more than a high AV, a stat boost and "if you get targeted by machine empathy, lol".
Even with something like the power armour histories in something like Deathwatch, just slapping on stat tweaks does disappear into the normal differences between character statlines. Saying that power armour has to be represented that way is like saying "Why have shooting skills? The game's already got a BS characteristic, just make that higher!"
Power armour in the game largely just makes characters powerful without making them particularly different or interesting. I'll agree that the end result needs to be efficient (maybe it'll all just come down to using a different injury chart for characters in power armour), but we're still in the phase of discussing what we
could do rather than necessarily what we will.
Quote from: DapperAnarchist on October 05, 2015, 07:18:29 PM
Could damage levels instead be wrapped up in a more general house rule for armour damage that allows for armour, even non-ablative, to be destroyed (or, rather, made non-effective)? Seems odd that 3 inches of ceramite and plasteel can, after a flurry of las bolts or shotgun blasts, withstand less impact than a thin steel/leather breastplate after the same impacts.
Well, as you've already observed, it's often not really worth keeping track of armour damage as the character is usually incapacitated before armour degradation would necessarily have taken major effect. You mentioned Jax - who I might keep track of armour degradation for, but she's an unusual case (and her wearing armour more so*).
* As she's got such powerful regeneration, she finds wearing armour more of a nuisance than a necessity. Her background does mention her sometimes using modified suits of Stormtrooper carapace for high risk operations - but, yes, they tend to be kind of ruined afterwards, because she can take more hits than the armour can!With that in mind, tracking degradation of power armour but not carapace isn't that unreasonable.
In any case, it's not entirely untrue. Ceramic armour has excellent single-hit protection, because it's hard enough to smash apart steel or tungsten-cored rounds, but it's also brittle (and tends to crack/shatter across large areas of a plate) which means it's compromised by fewer hits than a steel or kevlar based armour would be (which tend to deform rather than shatter), even if those armours aren't capable of stopping such powerful rounds.
And as far as the actual realism of it, armour rated for more powerful hits often can only take fewer hits. Ceramic armour has excellent single-hit protection, because it's very hard and is very effective at smashing apart bullets, even steel or tungsten core rounds. However, it's also brittle, and a crack will usually spread across an entire plate (many ceramic armours are tiled to reduce this effect), which means it's often compromised by the first few hits.
Steel armour isn't as hard (and is therefore much more vulnerable to AP rounds), but it has excellent toughness, meaning it can easily take multiple hits before its overall protective qualities are significantly compromised.
QuoteI'm very intrigued by the machine spirit ideas - but perhaps it should be the exception, rather than the rule? Perhaps have it as a form of injury level, so that damage to the suit/disruption of the relationship between suit and wearer would cause, for X turns/until a test is passed, a need to use SG/MS rolls to perform most actions. Reduces the rolls, but keeps it around as a thing that could happen.
I'm not sure how to handle that, because that's an often divisive part of the background.
To some players, things like the machine spirit or "Anzion Theorem of Orkoid Mechamorphic Resonant Kinetics" are literal truths (so there is a sentience to machinery or things happen because Orks expect them to), but I've always seen these as a satirical element of the background - the machine spirit is in most cases* just normal mechanical malfunction horrifically misinterpreted through the lens of superstition and dogma (the reason because your gun jams if you don't anoint it with sacred lubricants is not because it's angry, it's because you haven't oiled it!).
* In the cases of things like titans and Land raiders, I have no doubts there is actual sentience, but how much power armour is actually sentient (and, more importantly, petulant) is a lot more arguable.
Quote from: Koval on October 07, 2015, 07:21:28 AM
Why are you guys trying to clutter up the game with so much crunch for a single piece of wargear? It's equipment. I agree it needs to be treated differently to how it is at the moment, but surely it's so much simpler to just take inspiration from the power armour rules and especially the history tables in Deathwatch and Rites of Battle, where that level of extra detail is relevant and pertinent. Inquisitor gets bogged down as it is by unnecessary complexity and adding more is a massive turn-off.
Change the way power armour works by all means but it needs to be kept simple, accessible and something players will want to use.
Thanks for the suggestions on the rules for Deathwatch and Rites of Battle. I'll have to check them out for inspiration.
In terms of adding clutter to the game, it's all in execution. To use the example of Marco's character from earlier in this thread, they have a huge number of abilities (30 some odd) but those abilities are inter-related and part of the character. In other words, they are extra rules that are unlikely to be forgotten because they are integral to the character and how the character is played. To forgot them is to forget the character you're playing.
And that's what I'm really going for here, creating a rules set that adds character to an iconic element of the 40K Universe. The rules as they stand do not represent power armor well at all. Its depiction in table top 40K is vastly over simplified because of that games scale but Inquisitor gives us a chance to explore PA in far more detail. Personally I don't think having a full character sheet for Power Armor is a burden, it just requires the player to make some choices about how much time they're willing to put into their warband and whether or not the potential hassle of an extra character sheet is worth it (or maybe they want to lighten the number of characters in the warband to compensate).
As for the notion that it's just a "single piece of wargear", I disagree. It's not the same thing as a pistol or a suit of armor or bionic implants. In fact, a suit of PA may incorporate all three of the aforementioned pieces of wargear and then some. Allowing players to get into this level of detail is what the game does best. Now it's true that there needs to be balance between details and practicality so the game doesn't get completely out of hand. For that reason I hope you do continue to tune into this thread as we're hashing out ideas, I'd definitely like the input of someone who will push back when we go overboard and keep the crew grounded.